You Say You Want a Revolution

This Thanksgiving I spent time with my family, at our house up near the mountains, and enjoyed every moment of being away from New York. I suppose one of the best things about living in the City would be leaving it. There's something so refreshing about being out, and then something so exhilarating about going back.

I was asked by the good folks over at the Huffington Post if I'd like to contribute to their Thanksgiving Day festivities, which would mean writing a little something in lieu of the holiday. Oddly enough, this was the second time I'd been asked to write about my favorite holiday, the first being for a small students magazine I was writing for when I was studying in Scotland. This time around, I wrote about the small things I was grateful for, and what I considered to be the heart of the holiday, the gist as it were/

In short, I believe Thanksgiving embodies the heart of what makes the idea of American so beautiful - it is a day dedicated to understanding that we all owe something to someone. We all have something to be grateful for, just as we all have benefited from someone else's kindness. There's something poetic to that, and I was trying to write about how I saw the nature of the holiday as being closely connected to the nature of the best of America. Ours is in the only country founded on an idea, a hope, and to me that signifies the boldest proof of what I call the revolutionary nature of optimism.

The danger of posting on a site like the Huffington Post is that people can comment on what you write, and you can (and will) see what they think. I was immediately lambasted for forgetting the horrific history America has in regards to the domination and decimation of the Native Americans, and was told to wake up, little girl. I get that a lot on the HuffPo. Reader commentaries are the bane and glory of young needy writers, I'm finding.

As much as any other reasonably educated young American, I am well aware of the horrendous history of our country, not only in regards to the Native Americans, but in colonization and hegemonic imperialism around the globe and throughout time. If I were ignorant to the dark side of America, I would not have spent a goodly portion of the past five years, marching, protesting, arguing and despairing. But, at the end of the day, I choose believe in this place, at least for the time being. At least in some understanding of what America means. At least what it means to me.

What I really wanted to talk about the need to come together, as families or friends, as comrades and opponents and lovers, to talk, and how I believe Thanksgiving is one of the best opportunities to do so. Thanksgiving isn't about going out, it's not about gifts or parties or any of the other things that bother me so much about other big holidays. It's about sitting around a table with the people you (hopefully) love, and telling stories and laughing. Times are bad now, and in bad times, when evil seems to be leering so near to us, and looming so deep inside of us, those are the times when must come together and celebrate. We must celebrate every possible thing.

Celebration of the small things does not mean that we ignore our travesties… But it does mean that we make a definitive choice to embrace our shadows and meet an unknown future with hope.

It just so happened that the next day I was lucky enough to stumble onto bell hooks' essay "Love as the Practice of Freedom." I know, one doesn't really stumble onto bell hooks essays, but it's better than just saying that it was in a collection of essays I'd been meaning to read and finally got around to reading.

The basis of hooks' argument that in order for substantial political action and serious movement towards freedom for the subjugated, we must embrace a "love ethic" which requires that one thinks and acts outside of the self. At first I was skeptical, but as hooks herself writers, "choosing to love is not a sentimental gesture." It is a pro-active choice that is as revolutionary as I believe optimism to be.

This however left me with a conundrum: If love is a strategic move towards freedom and liberation, and optimism is a revolutionary act, how can two problematically obtuse ideas be employed? How does one "use" optimism, or rather, how does one make optimism act politically? How does one move away from optimism or love as a mere vantage point and turn it into a political philosophy?


Naturally,
Lizzie

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

In celebration of the Mid-Term elections, feel free to head on over to the Huffington Post and read my new piece, Presidential Strange Love.

Go vote!

Naturally,
Lizzie

A Definite Difference

A man in Georgia was convicted today for mutilating his two year old daughter's genitals. Khalid Adem from Lawrenceville in Gwinnet County, is believed to have removed his daughter's clitoris with a pair of regular scissors. Adem maintains that while someone has mutilated his daughter, it was not him.

The United States State Department estimates that 130 million women and girls have suffered genital mutilation since 2001 alone. We often think of this practice as being a third world phenomenon, and to discover it in our heartland is jarring to say the least. It will no doubt result in someone deciding to labeling it an immigrant issue; yet another reason to kick them all out. I am more interested in how frequently this sort of genital mutilation is called "female circumcision."

Circumcision is "the surgical removal of the foreskin of the penis," according to Meriam Webster. While some believe that circumcision shouldn't be preformed on all healthy male infants, it remains that removal of the foreskin doesn't deny the child of anything. Nothing about this definition suits the reality of the tradition of removing a female child's genitals.

Firstly, the removal of a girl's (or in some cases, a woman's) clitoris denies her of sexual sensation, of pleasure, and sexual identity. It is a concrete step to strip a female body of what makes it female, as well as a move to turn the female body into a tool; sex with a body that cannot feel pleasure is sex with a body that is just a receptacle in which to plant offspring. Secondly, rarely is this process "surgical," surgery being a optional procedure done in a clean and safe environment which continues to regard the health of the patient after the procedure. Genital mutilation is often carried out on the floor of living spaces, using tools (small knifes, scissors, broken razor blades) that are used on more than one girl in a session. Those who carry out the mutilation, frequently local women, are not doctors, and the "patients" frequently are not willing participants. Thirdly, the ceremony doesn't always just entail the removal of the clitoris. It's not uncommon for the entire process to include sewing closed the vaginal opening, the outer lips of the labia are cut off, and the remaining labia sewn shut, often resulting in serious infection and death. Lastly, whereas male infant circumcision only happens once, many women undergo repeated procedures: if the woman gets pregnant, the stitches will be cut open, only to be re-sewn after the child is born, again often resulting in serious infection and death. Really, any step in the whole procedure can result in infection and death. It's a death-centric thing.

In summary: It's not a fucking circumcision. It's butchery.

I'm aware that there's an issue of First World feminists rushing into Third World countries and pronouncing cultural mainstays wrong (even the terms "first world" and "third world" are problematic.) (By the way, has anyone heard of a Second World country? If you have, do you have an example?) But surely there's a difference between an upper class agnostic American feminist commenting on Arab women wearing the veil, and anyone talking about what's happening to these girls. Leave your comments, thoughts, poems.

I'll refrain from adding a dinner recipe.

You can read about the case in Georgia here.

Naturally,
Lizzie